VMware Places a Bet on Enterprise Hybrid Cloud

August 29, 2011

This morning at VMworld, VMware is announcing a number of things which together show they’re making a big bet on enterprises looking to hybrid cloud as their way of moving from a pure on-premise approach towards infrastructure. The announcements take the form of both partnerships and technologies to enable those partnerships to work smoothly.

VMware vCloud Connector 1.5 – vCloud Connector is a tool to enable easy transfer between public and private clouds. The latest version promises faster transfer architecture and accessibility from any browser.

vcloud.vmware.com – is a showplace for vCloud service providers that is integrated with vCloud Connector meaning that organizations can move workloads directly to services profiled on the site

vCenter Site Recover Manager is a Cloud-based disaster recover service that is going to be offered by FusionStorm, Hosting.com, iland and VeriStor. The four initial vendors allow organizations to failover from their on-premise infrastructure in the event of a disaster

Global Connect is a technology that allows organizations to take advantage of multiple service providers running VMware vCloud. With Global Connect organizations can use multiple cloud services in multiple geographies as if they were a single cloud. First providers to support Global Connect include Bluelock, Colt, SIngTel and SoftBank

What does it mean?

There’s no denying the fact that for large enterprises, hybrid cloud is the preferred approach to take. One of the barriers to cloud adoption for enterprises is the fact that in order to enjoy the benefits that service from disparate providers in multiple geographies brings, there is a high level of work involved. There have generally been two approaches to solving this problem – the first sees a more standards-based approach used by vendors, which is where OpenStack is pushing its value proposition. The other approach is to abstract the interoperability functions of multiple clouds away to a third party – which is where enStratus is placing its bet – managing the increasingly complex realities of multiple cloud services from multiple cloud vendors in multiple geographies.

With this roll out of both partnerships and technology, VMware is trying to enable itself to go out to the largest enterprises with a compelling proposition that gives them a known technology stack, with the benefits that multiple geographies and providers brings. It’s something of a desperate reaction to the growing momentum of OpenStack, a momentum that, as yet, hasn’t seen much in the way of real world roll outs.

If VMware can really get both the partnerships with service providers, and the technology to truly enable a “single pane of glass” view of infrastructure, they’ll likely steal a bit of a march on both the more open approaches to interoperability and the third party governance offerings. Of course it’s still interoperability of a purely VMware flavor, and while definitely enlarging the walls around the garden, it’s still a walled garden approach to hybrid cloud. But it’s a step in the right direction for sure.

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Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.